The figure didn't move. Neither did Kael.
For a long moment, they stood in the moonlit ruin—one with a hidden face, the other with burning sigils pulsing beneath his skin. The sword still floated between them, humming like it breathed, soft and alive.
"Who are you?" Kael asked.
"I am a Watcher," the figure said. "A warden of what remains. A witness to what must not rise again."
"That doesn't tell me anything."
"You are not meant to understand. Not yet."
Kael took another step forward. The markings on his arms brightened, casting a faint glow across the stone floor. "Then let me touch it. The sword. I need to know what it is."
The Watcher lifted a hand, palm outward. "If you touch that blade now, it will burn your soul hollow."
Kael hesitated. The pulse in his chest beat faster. The blade vibrated in response, shifting slightly in the air like it recognized him.
"What is it?"
"A shard," the Watcher said. "From the Sigil of Light."
Kael's heart skipped. The Sigil of Light—one of the Seven. The one that vanished in the final days of the war, said to be lost when the city of Elvarion fell into the sky and never came down.
"This shouldn't be here."
"Nothing in the Blightlands should be."
Kael lowered his dagger slightly, but didn't sheath it. "Why are you warning me, then? Why not take the blade and leave?"
The Watcher tilted their head. "Because it chose you. And because I do not kill children."
That word—chose—echoed in Kael's head like thunder in a canyon.
He glanced at the blade again. The air around it shimmered faintly, bending light like heat off desert stone. Something inside it… no, beneath it, stirred. Ancient. Watching.
Kael clenched his fists. "What if I don't want it?"
"Then you will die without understanding why the world burns."
The Watcher turned, cloak billowing in the wind.
"Walk away, Echo. For now. But if you truly wish to claim your fate, follow the road east—beyond the Bone Coast. Seek the Ember Archive. If you live long enough to reach it, you'll find answers."
Kael didn't move.
"Wait," he called out. "What's your name?"
The figure paused at the archway. For a moment, Kael thought they might answer.
Then the Watcher was gone—vanished into shadow without a sound.
Kael sat near the blade until sunrise.
He didn't touch it. Not yet. He simply watched it float, its surface shifting between steel and starlight. It pulsed like his heartbeat. It wanted him. That much was clear.
But he didn't trust it. He didn't trust himself.
When the first rays of red dawn crept across the horizon, he stood, turned his back to the ruin, and began walking east.
The Blightlands were not made for living things.
Kael passed through fields of boneflowers—delicate white petals that whispered curses in the wind. He crossed a bridge made of fused corpses, a relic of a forgotten battle. He skirted around a canyon that glowed green at night and smelled like burned skin.
Along the way, he found others. Survivors. Traders. Outcasts. He kept his head down, his face shadowed. But the markings on his body had started to glow even in sleep. The starlight bled through his skin now, no longer just in times of fear or pain. It was spreading.
He was changing.
One night, while camping under the wreckage of a shattered skyship, Kael heard a voice—not in his dream, but in his ear.
"Pretty lightshow you've got there."
He spun, dagger drawn, only to find a girl perched on the edge of the broken hull above him. She was maybe seventeen, wiry and tanned, with close-cropped copper hair and a scar running from the corner of her mouth to her jaw. She held a long rifle with runes carved into the barrel.
"Don't worry," she said, hopping down. "If I meant to shoot you, you'd already be leaking."
Kael didn't relax. "Who are you?"
She grinned. "Name's Riven. You're an Echo, yeah?"
He hesitated.
"Don't bother lying," she added. "I can see it. The glow. The twitch in the air around you. Hell, I've tracked six like you in the last year."
"Why?"
"Because there's a bounty," she said simply, slinging the rifle over her shoulder. "But don't freak out—I'm not selling you. I hate the people paying."
Kael narrowed his eyes. "Then why are you here?"
"Because I think you're interesting," she said. "And because if you're headed to the Ember Archive, you'll need help. There are worse things than bounty hunters between here and there."
Kael didn't answer. But he didn't run, either.
Riven sat cross-legged by the fire, pulling out dried meat and a small flask. She offered both. Kael took them cautiously.
After a long silence, she glanced at him sideways.
"Do you dream?" she asked.
"…Sometimes."
"Of a woman with silver eyes?"
His blood ran cold.
"Yeah," she said. "Me too."